All six movies in the Haggiag Competition for Israeli feature films at the Jerusalem Film Festival, which runs until September 4 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, have been screened and this is one of the strongest slates in recent years. We will have to wait until later this week for the winners to be announced, but audiences will have something to look forward to when these movies are released in the coming year.
The most anticipated movie this year is Tom Shoval’s Shake Your Cares Away, which was executive produced by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant. Shoval made a splash eight years ago when he won this competition with his first feature film, Youth, about two brothers whose family is broke and who kidnap a classmate. Shake Your Cares Away is far more ambitious. It stars French/Argentinian actress Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) as Alma, the widow of a billionaire who, feeling guilty over her privilege, invites a homeless family to live in her mansion on the beach in Caesarea. They are quickly joined by dozens of their friends from south Tel Aviv and they attract the attention of a brutal gangster. While the homeless people give her a sense of purpose, they eventually start complaining and become antagonistic and entitled.
Shake Your Cares Away is a reworking of the classic 1961 film Viridiana by Luis Bunuel, about a novice about to take her nun’s vows who comes to stay with a lecherous uncle and invites the village’s beggars to live with her in his mansion. It is extremely audacious to rework a masterpiece but somehow Shoval makes it work as a drama that comments on economic inequality in contemporary Israel, although it lacks the sensuality and sense of sin that made Viridiana so unforgettable.
Pini Tavger, an actor, made a wonderful short film called Pinhas about 13 years ago, about a boy raised in Israel by his exhausted Ukrainian single mother, who is drawn to the warmth of an ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi family who lives in their building. Tavger has expanded the short into the full-length feature, More Than I Deserve, and he has developed the characters and deepened the narrative into a beautiful and moving film. In the short film, the mother, who neglected her son, was a mainly negative character, while the religious family represented only virtue. But in this longer film, the characters are more complex and the mother (Anna Dobrovski) is much more compelling. Dobrovski gives a wonderful performance in which she conveys how much she loves her son (Micha Prudovsky) and how desperately she wishes for a better life for him. When he begins studying for his bar mitzvah with Shimon (Yaakov Zada Daniel of Fauda), a Chabad volunteer, this new relationship changes all three of their lives in unexpected ways.
Cinema Sabaya by Orit Fouks Rotem is a joyous look at a video workshop for a group of female Jewish and Arab municipality workers led by Rona (Dana Ivgy), a young filmmaker, that has a feeling of real authenticity. It explores the bonds that form among the women, how traumas surface and how the workshop encourages them to try to fulfill their dreams. Speaking of dreams, the film features a dream cast of both professional and non-professionals, each of whom gives a performance that is remarkable in its own way.
Take the ‘A’ Train by Yair Asher and Itamar Lapid stars Yakir Portal as Yishai, a successful jazz pianist in Paris, who comes home to Tel Aviv after a breakup and starts hanging out with his brother, Omer (Yuval Oron), a college dropout who does little more than organize parties with his roommate (Roy Miller). That may not sound like a very promising setup but the movie explores the two brothers’ lives in a way that makes you care about them. The two lead actors are outstanding and we accept them as brothers. The movie shows the stress that young people experience when they are trying to figure out their lives. The parents are played by musician Alon Oleartchik and Anat Azmon, who starred in Avi Nesher’s classic, Dizengoff 99, which has many themes in common with this movie.
Hadas Ben Aroya’s All Eyes Off Me mines similar territory but less successfully. It is about how 20-something Tel Aviv residents do not really connect, but I couldn’t figure out the point. It starts out promisingly, as Danny (Hadar Katz), a young woman at a party, searches for Max (Leib Levin), the man who has just gotten her pregnant and when she finds him he is deep in conversation with a new girlfriend, Avishag (Elisheva Weil). I think it was meant to be either sexy or shocking or both, but I could not connect to the characters.
The Swimmer by Adam Kalderon is a very different kind of film from what is usually shown at festivals. It tells the story of Erez (Omer Perelman Striks of Shababnikim), an aspiring Olympic swimmer at a strict training camp who falls in love with a fellow athlete, Nevo (Asaf Jonas). It’s a visually striking movie with a pulsing pop score that taps all the familiar tropes of the sexy sports movie, especially Robert Towne’s Personal Best.
Pandemic permitting, these movies will soon be playing all over Israel and at festivals around the world.